Three Tips for Couples With Conflicting Investment Styles

TED JENKIN: You are a big spender and she’s a mattress stuffer. You like the idea of house flipping and she prefers a money market. You’ll go for the IPO and she’ll go for the blue-chip stock that has been around forever. Now that you are newly married or living together, how can you ever see eye to eye on the best way to manage the family investments? Here are three quick young couple tips to deal with opposing investment styles.

Get educated on the meaning of the word risk. It’s likely nobody ever explained all the types of risk associated with investing to a young couple. Did the money-mattress person realize he or she could be safely going backward each year with the risk of inflation? Did the IPO investor realize the risk of losing all of his or her money with the latest social-media stock? The young couples of today need to get informed on what risk really means.Get educated on the impact of time. A young couple should have a thorough discussion of their goals and how they will allocate their resources toward their goals. No matter how aggressive or conservative each partner is with money, learning how time may impact the risk they can take to reach their financial goals will be an important part of the education process.

Get educated on their childhood. Yes, childhood. From my experience, often the genesis of money attitudes and habits for better or worse largely come from your partner’s childhood. While you may not be able to change this, gaining some perspective about why your partner thinks the way he or she does about money could help lessen the disputes you have about investing.